Unbound

Last night in NYC Matt Macinnis unveiled Inkling Habitat at an event called Unbound. What they were smart to market during the presentation was discoverability. They have opened their site to Google which means people are searching for phrases like "fall exile and return to babylon" and the second result is inkling.com. Of course their phrases require a large number of specific words to put Inkling towards the top of the search results, but this is good for discoverability and as they point out much better than Amazon which doesn't allow results straight into the book. Also they've only been live since December 2012. To keep people from reading the whole book after they read too much content the app limits them for 24 hours (the specific "too much" amount wasn't mentioned).

What I was most impressed by is that Inkling now has an enterprise model of which Pearson is the first participant. All they said though was the enterprise model allows you to brand everything with your name and possibly host the system yourself, but they had no details. I think this may address a for some regarding loss of branding on inkling.com. I wish there had been more detail on what enterprise meant, because there's a larger range of what it might mean. Anyway, I can see Pearson's interest as it makes sense for their content. Text books are a perfect fit and that's most of Perason.

They are supporting Creative Commons licensing for all of their content, which is great for collaboration within the platform. This brought in some interesting partners like the 20 Million Minds (www.20mm.org). I'm not sure if it is something authors, agents and editors would love though as it reuse can also feel like loss of control.

Matt was very anti-Amazon in their presentation. He compared Amazon to Darth Vader and accused them of controlling everything. What's interesting is Inkling is positioning themselves to be in the same sort of place someday.

The HTML produced by Habitat has long and somewhat meaningless CSS class names. This might make a mess of a style guide, though a closer look would be needed to tell. If everything flowed well it would all work, but if not it might be a headache to edit. Also a concern is the preview render time for ePub. When an eBook creators have an issue with formatting they sometimes iteratively tweak and preview, but if your render time is long it makes this process excruciating. Also not as impressive is the ePub output, though the Inkling output looks great. I could see this changing as Inkling matures.